Georgia is well-known for requiring candidates in general elections to receive a majority of the vote. If not, there is a December run-off. Georgia now has a group working for traditional Ranked Choice Voting. It is not a group that combines support for ranked choice voting with ending the ability of parties to have nominees.

The group is Better Ballot Georgia. If it were to succeed in persuading the Georgia legislature to use ranked choice voting instead of general election runoffs, that would probably make it easier to also persuade the legislature to ease the terribly strict ballot access laws for minor parties and independent candidates. UPDATE: here is a news story about attempts to persuade the legislature.

Here is the group’s website.

In other related news, David Ralston died on November 16, 2022. He had been a State Senator 1992-1998, and a member of the House starting in 2002. He had been re-elected earlier this month. He had served as Speaker of the House starting in 2010, although he had indicated he would resign as speaker due to health problems. He was a powerful opponent of ballot access reform.

On November 7, the Alabama Secretary of State appealed Greater Birmingham Ministries v Merrill, 22-13708, to the Eleventh Circuit. This is the lawsuit over access to certain Alabama voter registration records. The U.S. District Court had ruled against the Secretary of State. The plaintiff, a voting rights group, had asked for lists of persons removed from the registration rolls because of a felony conviction, lists of persons whose voter registration application was rejected because of an earlier felony conviction, and lists of people purged from the rolls immediately after the 2020 election.

No Labels, which holds itself out as an entity that is not a political party but which may put an independent centrist presidential candidate on the 2024 ballot, is busy qualifying itself as a party. On November 25 it released a video that mentions its petitioning progress so far: Alabama 80,000; Alaska 6,000; Arizona 46,000; North Carolina 23,000; Ohio 123,000; Oregon 23,000.

Here is the YouTube. When Alabama is mentioned, the screen says 80,000 have been collected, but the narrator says the Alabama figure is 8,000.